View full sizeHoward Birdsall of Brielle, who retired last year as the chief executive officer of Birdsall Services Group, pleaded not guilty today along with the company and six other former executives and shareholders accused of conspiring to circumvent the state's pay-to-play law.N.J. Attorney General's Office

TOMS RIVER — The engineering firm Birdsall Services Group and seven of its former executives pleaded not guilty today to conspiring to illegally finance the campaigns of some of the same elected officials responsible for granting them millions of dollars in public contracts.

The company’s retired chief executive, Howard C. Birdsall, 70, of Brielle, and the six others posted bail and rejected plea bargains — all of which called for several years of prison time — during a hearing before Judge Wendel Daniels in state Superior Court in Ocean County.

None of the men spoke during the hearing, which lasted about 30 minutes. Their attorneys said they intend to work together to present a unified defense, but added they need at least three months to pore over some 60 boxes of discovery compiled by prosecutors.

“There’s a lot that’s going to go on in the case, but we’re not ready now,” said Attorney John McDonald, who represented Howard Birdsall. “The voluminous amount of discovery we got is hundreds of thousands of pages.”

The lead prosecutor for the state Attorney General’s Office, Anthony Picione, said reviewing discovery should take no more than a month, prompting laughs from throughout the courtroom. The judge gave the defense 75 days until the next hearing, scheduled for Aug. 5.

State authorities claim that over six years, the company and its senior executives ran one of the largest schemes ever in New Jersey history to skirt laws enacted to prevent contractors from essentially buying public contracts with campaign contributions.

The state’s pay-to-play law limits companies with $17,500 or more in state contracts to $300 or less in contributions, according to the state Election Law Enforcement Commission.

To skirt the law, the company and executives funneled money to elected officials by gathering personal checks of $300 or less from various employees and sending them in bundles to campaigns, according to a nine-count indictment handed up in March.

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The contributions went undetected by the public in part because political campaigns are not required to report who gives them contributions of $300 or less. The Attorney General’s Office has declined to say who received Birdsall money, except to note that it went to Republicans and Democrats.

A Star-Ledger analysis last month found that politicians in New Jersey are allowed to keep secret the donors behind more money than those any other state in the country, leading to millions of dollars in secret contributions every year. A bill has since been introduced in the state Senate to require that all donors be disclosed.

Once the employees made the contributions on behalf of Birdsall, the indictment said, the company then reimbursed them through salary bonuses and routinely lied in certifications about the reimbursements to state election officials.

In all, the seven are charged with cloaking more than $686,000 in contributions that would have otherwise disqualified the Eatontown-based company from receiving contracts.

Picione said Howard Birdsall and three others — Williams Birdsall, Thomas Rospos and Alan Hilla Sr. — were offered plea bargains that would require them to admit to a second-degree charge, face a recommended sentence of five years in state prison and agree to be banned from working on state contracts for 10 years.

Three other defendants — Scott MacFadden, James Johnston and Robert Gerard — were offered the same deal but would face a sentence of three years in prison. The company was also offered a plea bargain that included a 10-year ban from state contracts. None of the state's offers were accepted.